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YouTube Video Advertising: A Brief Introduction

YouTube gets over 1 billion views per day. How huge is that? If YouTube was a search engine, it would be nearly 2 times larger than Bing and Yahoo search combined, making YouTube the second largest search engine (behind YouTube owner, Google.com) in the world. With over a billion views each day and the content that is uploaded on the site, over 100 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube, EVERY MINUTE of the day, advertising your product on YouTube is a no brainer.

If you have spent more than few seconds on the site, then you’ve seen one of those ads that show up before you watch your video. Getting an ad up is the easy part, making it a success (ROI wise) and building an ad presence on YouTube, is practically a science within itself.

The first thing you should do, (after creating your ad, of course) and if you haven’t already done so, create a YouTube Account and upload your ad(s). Then go to Google AdWords and create an AdWords account. Afterwards, go to adwords.google.com/video to create a new video ad campaign. Then you will have to link your YouTube and AdWords accounts together.

Now you will head for your general settings for your ad and set your desired budget per day. The average spend for an ad is between $.01 to $0.23 per view (You don’t have to pay Google unless the ad is watched all the way through.)

Then you will want to set up where you want your ad to appear. You can set up your range from practically anything from countries, cities, ZIP codes, IP addresses, etc., be as specific as you would like, if you’re targeting a certain audience or, if you’re looking to build your brand, a more general approach may be your best route.

Next you will choose the video that you want to showcase and upload it to your AdWords video account from YouTube.

Taking your ad placement to the next level, you would go to the “advanced settings” section. There you can choose what days/time of the day you want your ads to show (one thing to keep in mind is the best time to show your ad, when it would reach the largest/most targeted audience) and the beginning and end date for your ads to run. Another key element to your advertising is “device targeting”, where you can choose specific devices you want to target (mobile, desktop, laptop, tablets, etc.) You can also select age, gender and specific topics you would like for your ad to show up, as stated earlier, being specific can help get your ad better results. Keywords directed to your potential customers is a must and using the Google Keyword Tool is a great option to find those terms that will best help you obtain your goal and, once again, to be as specific as possible.

This is just “the tip of the iceberg” of all there is to getting started in YouTube advertising, and hopefully this article provided an adequate first look into the vast universe that is YouTube video advertising.